


A Winter's Tale

by Gabihime



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-22
Updated: 2004-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:59:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1637822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gabihime/pseuds/Gabihime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I think David Lynch wrote this fanfic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Winter's Tale

**Author's Note:**

> Written for merriman

 

 

It was strangely always mid-winter when his thoughts turned from the howling, empty winds that bit and ate of the flesh of both the mortal and the elder, turned from the corpsecold candles that flickered with blue flame and claimed the winter's strength for the ever ebbing, ever flowing, ever rising Dark, turned from the snow that fell deep on Chiltern hills, trackless in the king's forests, deep and forgiving and forgetting as its fingers slipped up around your thighs and left you dead, dead as mortal flesh left to moulder, a feast for the worms, until winter broke like a pane of shattered glass and the thaw brought things whole again, transformative, like the Hunting of the Wren. So in the hours he stood shiftless in the stone hall with its thousand prefigured tapestries of things that had been and that were and that still came even in these days in the age past the Pendragon and the crystal sword, when his mind would have been more easily occupied the ever-constant decay of mortal flesh, even in the hard freeze that might hold it perfectly in stasis for centuries, with loss and with pain and with the winter's heart that gave up no seed, Merriman Lyon's thoughts kept to different subjects, more suited to finer climes.

When powder snow as heavy as death made even the great Doors a trial to pass through, Merriman thought of his children, his two sons -- the favored and the prodigal, and the path through the ages, kept piecemeal, that brought them to their resting points. Neither properly the spill from his loins, they were still both his progeny, closer tied to his line than they had been to their mortal sires, both whelped in his periphery and brought to his knee when they were of a proper age to squire. In the two of them he had the mortal flesh, so fallible, weak, mistaken, and beautiful, trusting until that trust turned and struck like a cobra, venemous and beloved, greencoated Hawkin, the asp clasped to his breast -- and he also had the elder flesh, Will Stanton, large eyes beetle-blue and gone ageless and depthless before his time, at his time, in the sign-seeking and the sign-binding, caught forever between his own Pendragon and Lady, as Merriman was still mirror lashed to his own, a fly in amber, or perhaps in rose quartz. His two sons: the prodigal walker, feet worn trackless smooth from the curse he had brought upon his own head with his careless Judas kiss, forever jealous of the cradle blessings of his brother, the elder born, Will Stanton, sign-seeker, sword-chaser, the lyon cub of the younger Pendragon.

And inexerably, when his thoughts turned to his sons, the ever-dying and the ever-living, his mind was not long to stray after their other-father, the other man who had shaped and warped them like glass under too much heat -- under too much ice, the man who had belied Merriman's patient and subtle hand in favor of his own -- which was always open-handed, yes, but open-handed like a slap, rage and hate and murder and violence all in the fire-blue stare of High Magic's defining red-headed step-child, the black-swarthed and black-souled. Mithoin, the elder darkness, the lilting stain that cursed his ears whenever the tongue of the serpent wrapped itself around the elder speech.

When one said -Lord of the Dark,- there was only one than answered that call, master of his sister in white the same way he was master of all of them. The rising Dark boiled and crested under one man and one man alone. Tall, bone thin, scoured almost skeleton white depending on when he rode, what age, and with who, Conquest and War and Famine all one horseman, tall and cloaked in a shadow stitched with the world's vilest and purge-black hate-vomit, trimmed by the night without stars, by the night without hope, horse shod with the bones of mortal men, doomed to die, he was primordial sick-slick fear and pain -- he was everything in the Dark, the rock that they ground themselves into and the thorn crown they wore high on their heads, their god and their firepit. When one called out the -Lord of the Dark,- one called out the Black Rider.

Attended by his rooks as page-boys, when one asked for the Dark, one -begged- for the Black Rider.

Here in the hall where the Lady sat rose quartz by the fire and Will Stanton paced tread into the rug around the candlering and his hound sat in the corner, fingers laced, pensive, and dreaming the same winterdeep dreams of Welsh snow and a boy with falcon-yellow eyes, these were all pages in a book of -wanting,- the Lady for the sea-eyed Pendragon who would be holding court on the deathless isle, cut off from her by the deep snow of midwinter and the care of time. The Lyon knew his sire and knew well his place in the ordering of things, trapped in rose quatz, the balancing knife edge of a triptyche, and he would not have traded it for heaven or earth, even if it had been a thing it was possible to shift, lives and destinies having been writ so long ago that it was near beyond reckoning.

But sometimes, with the winter in his bones chilling his blood, breath, and soul solid, until there was something empty and loose inside him, like a tapestry with half the stiching torn out, like the crystal sword shattered, like the grail gone to lead and blood gone to bile, and it rose in his head, like the sun burning sickness in his heart, in his head, and in those desperate moments when his pulse beat as slow as the scytheblade glow of the Dark's midwinter candles, he wondered the cost of the dead and the vile and the broken things in the world, the purposefully broken, the trod upon, the shattered, and in that way he knew he was -kin- to the master of the Dark.

"Amaryllis," she said, stealthy on his heels like a cat, "Is beautiful to look at, but if you eat of it, it will kill you faster than cyanide."

And it was so.

 


End file.
